Social Issues Overview

Although the costs of addiction or substance abuse are seen most clearly at the individual or familial level – substance abuse and addiction create significant challenges in our communities too. Everyone is affected by substance abuse, and the costs of addiction (health care costs, policing or incarceration costs, addiction treatment costs, decreased worker productivity, ineffective parenting etc.) are shared by all tax payers and citizens. Substance abuse is everyone’s problem and reducing the burden of addiction in our communities is in everyone’s best interest!

While there’s no doubt that substance abuse and addiction
harms the individual and those closest to her most deeply, those that abuse
drugs and alcohol also exist in larger society and so the costs of addiction
and abuse extend also to larger society.

Addiction leads to
poor health and corresponding health care costs – to desperation and the crime
that accompanies an overwhelming need to use and to an enormous prison
population, with most of those behind bars incarcerated for crimes committed
while intoxicated or for drug possession or distribution.

Few families live
untouched by addiction directly, but even those that never know the heartache
of substance abuse close to home pay the price for addiction through its much
larger social costs.

Addiction and
substance abuse affect everyone.

Society and Addiction

Some of the many ways addiction affects society include:

Increased
health care costs

Reduced
productivity

Greater
incidences of on-the-job accidents

Increased
social welfare costs

Incarceration

Drug
violence

Organized
crime

Petty
crime to fuel a drug habit

Impaired
driving

Children
born with physical or brain damage to mothers who used drugs or alcohol
while pregnant

Increased
transmission of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other infections diseases –
transmission through the sharing of needles or pipes or through risky
sexual activity

Overdose
death

Ineffective
or absent parenting

Family
breakup

School
drop out

Many
more

A Few Statistics

While numbers can’t tell the human story of alcoholism and
addiction, they do speak somewhat to its devastating social costs.

Underage
drinking costs America
more than 61 billion dollars per year. These costs include health care,
legal and quality of life costs. 1

Since
1985, there has been an alarming increase in the number of incarcerated
Americans. In federal prisons, 80% of this increase are those incarcerated
for drug offences

Drug
and alcohol abuse costs the American economy between 400 and 500 billion
dollars per year

The
health care costs for those that abuse alcohol are roughly twice the costs
of non abusers

1 in
4 deaths in American can be linked to alcohol, tobacco or drug use2

Of the
almost half a trillion dollars federal state and municipal governments
spend because of substance abuse, only about 2% of that money goes
to treatment or prevention! 3